“Hannah Retires from Bank Here,” Brownsville Herald 13 June 1954, p. 1. Moody Interests of Galveston buy control of First National Bank from J. W. Hannah, who purchased bank in 1943 from Hubert R. Hudson estate. Hannah sold his interests to Moodys in November 1953. Hannah was born in Alabama in 1908 but grew up in Oklahoma. Banker in Oklahoma before moving to Brownsville.

John G. Fernández subsequently acquired controlling interest and on 12 July 1922 re-chartered the bank as the State National Bank. Fernández built new building at Elizabeth and 12th St. In 1937 senior Hubert R. Hudson acquired controlling interest from John G. Fernández. Received permission to change name from State National Bank to First National Bank at Brownsville. [Previous First National Bank of Brownsville, chartered in 1892, declared insolvent in 1932.] In 1941 Harry M. Scott and J. W. Hannah purchased bank from Hudson family and continued to own it until 1954.

In Brownsville, Phelps & Dewees & Simmons were also architects of:

Sams Memorial Stadium, 1954

Lueralam Manor, 1958 (demolished)

Mercy Hospital additions, 1956-58 (demolished)

Cleve Tandy Hall, Texas Southmost College, 1956-61 (altered)

Gladys Porter Zoo, 1968-72

Both Gladys Sams and Dean Porter were directors of the First National Bank when its new building was constructed. They seem to be the link to Phelps & Dewees & Simmons. The senior Lloyd M. Bentsen and his nephew Donald were also directors of the bank, as was Hubert R. Hudson, Jr.

The First National Bank Building was part of a trend by Valley and border financial institutions to construct new downtown headquarters buildings in the 1950s. These were conservative examples of modern architecture. The First National Bank in Harlingen (1952), the Pan American State Bank in Brownsville (1957), the Harlingen National Bank in Harlingen (1958), the Laredo National Bank in Laredo (1958), and the First National Bank in McAllen (1958) exemplified the 1950s trend toward downtown buildings that fit into the fabric of downtown. In the 1960s, new bank buildings, even when constructed downtown, were designed as frestanding pavilions, often juxtaposed with surface parking lots. The McAllen State Bank in McAllen (1961), the Southmost Savings & Loan Association Building in Brownsville (1962), the First National Bank in Edinburg (1964), the First National Bank in Mission (1964), and the First State Bank & Trust Co. in Mission (1964) are examples of the pavilion type, as is the National Bank of Commerce in Brownsville (1965), the first Brownsville bank to be built outside downtown. Although the First National Bank at Brownsville was identified with the more conservative 1950s buildings, it did set aside half of its block-front site on E. Levee for a surface parking lot and advertised the ingenuity with which its “serpentine lane” system of managing drive-in window traffic had been planned to avoid back-ups and delays for customers transacting their busines from their cars.

McAllen artist and art collector Ann Maddox Moore built this amazing modern house, designed by Merle A. Simpson, in 1959. Nestled at the end of a cul-de-sac that backs up to the Louisiana-Río Grande Canal Co.’s main canal, which ran parallel to S. 2nd Street, the one-story, post-beam-and-deck house is extraordinarily simple. A honeycombed solar […]

Architect Max Burkhart’s house attests to his involvement with concrete construction in the 1960s and 1970s. Burkhart founded Valcon, a Pharr construction company specializing in concrete tilt wall construction, with Farris O. Shannon in 1963. The one-story courtyard house is entered through a canopied porte-cochère-carport roofed with concrete umbrella vaults supported on extremely thin columns. […]

This is a design – build project conducted in partnership between Texas Southmost College Architecture Program and Brownsville Healthy Communities and bc Workshop. A two week design phase was completed by a group of ten (10) students from TSC Architecture Program as one of their Design Studio II service learning projects. A committee of professional […]

Thanks to preservation conscious developers like Jim Snyder of Elm Tree Partners, LLC the Lubbock, Texas Post Office & Federal Building will soon be a mixed-use residential complex. The building will house 24 apartments, and will preserve architectural features like windows, flooring, stairways and ceilings. This past month of May, I had the privilege of […]

Juan O’Gorman designed this modern building for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in 1937. I had the opportunity of visiting this past month of February 2016. The place is incredible! industrial and modern even today. Large windows are the center piece of the building and the second floor bridge connecting both buildings ideal even for […]

One of the two grandest houses built in Brownsville in the Depression decade was this country house, designed by Brownsville architects A. H. Woolridge and Frank E. Torres for Katherine Barnes and S. Miller Williams, Jr., of Tulsa OK. Williams and his brother founded a construction company that eventually specialized in steel pipeline construction. The […]

In his free time Brownsville Heritage Officer Roman McAllen, Assoc. AIA, a graduate of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, has rehabilitated a pair of dwellings for himself and his wife, Lisa, and also for his mother, Sybil Baytes McAllen, and brother Mark. The recycling of these houses demonstrates the […]